RIVERSIDE, Calif – On Election Night, Riverside County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries (1st District) celebrated the passage of Proposition 54, which will prohibit the Legislature from passing any bill unless published on the Internet for 72 hours before vote.

“This is a great victory for residents throughout California and a perfect example of why the initiative process is necessary” said Jeffries. “I introduced legislation to require bills to be publicly available 72 hours before any vote in each of the three terms I served in the State Assembly, and those in power ensured I didn’t get a single actual vote on my bills, despite support from newspapers and good government organizations statewide.”

“It was clearly not in the best interests of the Sacramento leadership and the special interest groups who write their bills to allow the public to have the opportunity to review their legislation before it came to a vote, and they were definitely not going to curtail their own power to keep the public in the dark,” explained the Supervisor.

Proposition 54 was put on the statewide ballot by California Forward and a host of other advocates for open government in California, including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the First Amendment Coalition, and the Sunlight Foundation.

Supervisor Jeffries praised the work of the organizations, saying “Only through the hard work of outside organizations without a direct financial stake in these reforms was passage of this law possible. The initiative process was created to give the people of the State of California the ability to make changes that those in power refuse to make themselves, and passage of Proposition 54 shows that the system can still work.”

72 hour requirement bills introduced by then-Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries were ACA 17 (’07-’08), ACA 8 (’08-’09), and ACA 1 (’11-’12), none of which received a single vote in committee.